Gear Review: LOWA Innox Evo GTX Lo shoes

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As some of you may know, I’m part of the Sport Dinaco team as an ambassador for LOWA Canada. I collaborate with companies whose products and services I love and trust, and who have values in line with my own. I get asked for a lot of advice and recommendations so it’s my pleasure to occasionally test out products and share my results. One of the products I’ve been testing from LOWA Canada over the last few months is their women’s Innox Evo GTX Lo all terrain sport shoes.

Use

Price

Pros

They’re light, grippy, supportive but comfortable, versatile, well-fitted, and waterproof without making my feet sweat. They’re light enough to want to wear on a tough, full day hike or to throw in your overnight pack for mutli-day trips to use for dayhikes mid-trip. The lugs are just the right depth for grip on hard, rocky terrain, and the material keeps your feet secure as you stablize over the uneven ground. The low profile is nice and breezy for hot, summer days, and they fit great on my narrow feet. The gore-tex waterproof lining is fantastic for Vancouver’s year-round wet climate. They can easily tackle a rainy trail run, a still-a-bit-snowy spring hike, and the deep mud puddles found on our trails almost year-round.

Cons

Sometimes when wearing them for extended periods of time I wish the soles were a little cushier, and the material a little stretchier but the reality is that would be asking for a unicorn. The shoes have a soft stabilizer to protect your soles from feeling the changes in terrain (ie getting stabbed by sharp rocks, and helping prevent plantar fasciitis as you don’t need to always be flexing your foot muscles to stabilize as the shoe does it for you). Unlike other fabrics which stretch a lot with your foot’s movements, gore-tex does not stretch very much. This is required to keep your feet dry, which I’d much rather prefer. The lack of stretch also helps with stablization, helping to avoid things like rolling your ankles.

Brunswick Mountain is a tough hike in Lions Bay. Climbing 1487 metres throughout the 19 km hike, it’s a steep slog up an almost constantly loose rock path. It starts off as a gravel path, then there’s a few kms of rooty forest, then up some more loose talus, then up over the jagged mountaintop. The rubber outsole with varying lugs of medium depth are great for grip and balance required on trails like these. Shoes with too deep a lug are much less stable. Without the ankle support of a boot, stability is key.

Back in May when the Grouse Grind still had snow in patches and lots of super wet and muddy spots, these shoes held up so well. Unlike lots of other people who had to tiptoe around these spots, I could save my energy and have a faster time by walking right through it and emerging with dry, clean feet.

Boating to a hike surrounded by water, having waterproof shoes were great here too. I could step into the shallow water to launch the canoe without getting my feet wet, and seamlessly transition to our easy hike through the forest to Widgeon Falls.